Quotes by Women Novelists

Why is it that so many people think that charity consists in giving away merely what they cannot use instead of the article the recipient needs?

Mabel Osgood Wright

He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. "Well, that was nice," she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicatd meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.

Elizabeth Strout

A fruit is not afraid of its own weight. It grows into its skin fully. It is whole, each part of its body equally alive.

Souls were the same. They, too, had useless baggage that impeded their proper performance, these annoying, holier-than-thou bits dangling like an appendix waiting for infection. Faith and hope and love...prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude...all this useless clutter just packed too much damn morality into the heart, getting in the way of the soul's innate desire for malignancy.

I don't like phones. You can't be sure people are paying attention to you when you're talking to them.

A woman will not understand what true dependency is until she is cradling her own infant in her arms; nor will she likely achieve the self-confidence she craves until she has withstood, and transcended, the weight of responsibility a family places upon her — a weight that makes all the paperwork and assignments of her in-basket seem feather-light.

Danielle Crittenden

If there was no fear, how could there be comfort? Or courage?

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

I have a work presently in the Press named 'Six Months in Hell' which you may one day read. I consider it will be worth perusing, bruising badly the morals of Britain and America, while Royalty, clergy, critics, society and bloodhounds of law must all incur its censure.

Amanda McKittrick Ros

There is a difference between the facts of a person and the truth of him.

Three things Marco taught me today race through my mind: boys will lie to your face just to have sex with you, don't trust any boy who says I love you, and never date a boy who lives on the south side of Fairfield.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Cam's wings were so bright they were almost blinding as they pulsed. "Holy Hell," Callie whispered, blinking."More or less," Arriane said

The gorilla is a strict vegetarian like the elephant and buffalo — three of the four most dangerous animals in Africa. It behooves one to walk softly with vegetarians.

Mary Hastings Bradley

Maybe da Vinci didn't serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.

Is that all? The mountain in labor has brought forth a mouse.

May Agnes Fleming

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

I know where my heart is, and I can go home again, whenever I like. Mother likes to say, "You can take the girl out the projects, but you can't take the projects out the girl." That may not apply to everyone, but in my case it's true. And I would have it no other way.

It's easy now, now that it's a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.

Let bygones be bygones because everybody knew that forgiveness was divine.

What arrogance, what stupidity led us to this desolation, to this madness, to this wickedness, to this war, to this death? When this cruel war was over, there will be no more war. It will not happen again, never again. NEVER AGAIN, never again.

God is forgiving or we would not still be walking this world. But to be moral is not to need his divine forgiveness, I think.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.